Nethook 🎣

A NetHack-style ASCII fishing roguelike to play in a second terminal window while Claude Code is busy. When Claude finishes, the game pings you to reel in.

  🎣 NETHOOK — Lake Taupō   🌧rain · autumn · 🌆dusk · 12°C · 🌕feeding

  ...........~~~~~~..........
  ........~~~~≈≈≈≈~~~~,......
  ......~~≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈~~"......
  =@~~≈≈≈≈ F ≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈~~......
  ......~~≈≈≈≈≈# ≈≈≈≈~~......
  ......$..~~~~≈≈≈~~~~.......

  ○ Land a trophy catch (+35c)   ✔ Log a new species (+25c)
  🏆 TROPHY Rainbow Trout — 3.1kg, grade S!  +186 pts

  ☀ ██████████░░░░░░  🎣Heirloom Rod  🪱Spinner Lure  ◎240c  ★186   ✅ Claude ready — reel in!
  move: hjkl/arrows · f+dir: cast · $: shanty · q: quit

Why

The spinner-stare while Claude works is dead time. Nethook fills it with a quick, glanceable fishing roguelike — and tells you the moment Claude is done.

A plugin can't render a live game inside Claude Code's own terminal (Claude owns that TTY), so Nethook runs as a standalone game in its own window. That's the authentic roguelike model anyway.

Requirements

• Claude Code (the CLI) — to install it as a plugin.
• Node.js ≥ 18 — the game is plain Node, zero dependencies.
• A real terminal you can open a second window/tab/pane in (the game runs in its own window — see Why). Works on macOS, Linux, WSL, and Windows Terminal.

Install & play (as a Claude Code plugin)

Run these two slash commands inside Claude Code — no build, no npm install, no marketplace approval needed:

/plugin marketplace add ClickClickMedia/Nethook   # 1. register this repo's marketplace
/plugin install nethook@nethook                    # 2. install the plugin (name@marketplace)

That's it. Now, any time Claude is busy and you want something to do:

/gofish                  # opens Nethook in a NEW terminal window
/gofish "Lake Taupō"     # …or jump straight into a specific spot

• If /gofish can't auto-open a window (headless or an unrecognised terminal) it prints a copy-paste command instead — paste it into any separate tab/pane.
• /nethook:spot "<real place>" has Claude generate a playable Spot Pack for a real location (ASCII map, real species, real tackle, real strategy) and installs it; then /gofish "<place>".

While Claude works, a Stop hook flips the game's status bar to "✅ Claude ready — reel in!" (with a terminal bell), and a PreToolUse hook nudges you to go fish when Claude kicks off a long command (once per session).

To update later: /plugin marketplace update nethook then re-run /plugin install nethook@nethook. To remove it: /plugin uninstall nethook@nethook.

Run it directly (without the plugin)

You don't need Claude Code to play — clone and run:

git clone https://github.com/ClickClickMedia/Nethook && cd Nethook
node game/index.mjs                 # play the procedural lake
node game/index.mjs "Lake Taupō"    # …or a named built-in spot

(The plugin's only extra is the /gofish window-launcher and the Claude-ready status handshake; the game itself is the same.)

Gameplay

• Move with hjkl or arrows; you walk the shore/dock (@).
• Fish: press f then a direction to cast at adjacent water. On a bite, a reel fight begins — r to reel, e to ease. Keep tension in the safe band: let it hit 100% and the line snaps, but let it sit too low and the line goes slack until the hook slips — so you can't just coast. Fights come in three flavours (rarer fish pick the nastier ones): a steady haul, a runner that bolts in bursts (ease while it runs, reel when slack), and a pendulum where you reel only while the sweeping lure sits in the green zone.
• Water: shallow ~, deep ≈, reeds ", lilypads ,, rocks # (no fish). Different species favour different depths.
• Shanty ($): spend coins on better rods and bait to unlock deeper water and rarer fish, or deploy a 🦀 crab pot. Gear and coins persist.
• Crab pot (idle): once deployed, it accrues a little catch in real time while you're away and pays out the next time you launch — but the haul decays Fresh → Stale → Rotting if you leave it too long, so check in regularly. Upgrade it at the shanty (Mk 1 → 2 → …) for bigger hauls — a late-game coin sink.
• Complete the logbook: catch every (non-junk) species at a spot and you earn the Golden Rod — the best rod in the game, granted once and kept for good.
• Trips: each launch is one bounded daylight session; at dusk it scores.
• Bounties: every trip rolls two goals (land a trophy, log a new species, hook an aberration…) that pay a coin + score bonus — a fresh objective each launch.
• Grades & trophies: every catch is graded F→SSS by how big it is for its species. A top-of-range specimen (or a rare gold strike) lands a 🏆 trophy worth a value bonus — the logbook remembers your best grade and trophy count.
• Aberrations: now and then — mostly at dusk or in fog — something wrong takes the hook. 🜂 Aberrant variants fight harder and pay far more.
• Logbook (persistent): species dex, biggest catches, best grades, trophies, totals, best score — saved under $XDG_DATA_HOME/nethook (or ~/.local/share/nethook).

Spot Packs

A Spot Pack is JSON describing a real location: an optional ASCII map, a species table with real behaviour, tackle, and strategy. Three ship built-in (game/packs/): Lake Taupō, The Everglades, Lofoten Fjord. Generate more with /nethook:spot. The engine validates every pack (game/pack.mjs) so a bad one can never crash the game; with no pack it builds a procedural lake.

Environment gating: each trip rolls a season and weather, and the day-phase moves with the daylight clock (dawn → day → dusk). Species can gate themselves by time, season, weather, and preferred bait, so a spot plays differently trip to trip — the skrei cod run shows up in winter, the kraken only at foggy dusk. Dawn/dusk and rain bite better. Gates are sanitized on load, never trusted.

Grounded bite model (optional realism): a species can declare a water-temp preference (tempOptimum / tempRange °C); the engine derives the trip's water temperature from the season around the spot's annual mean (hints.baseTemp), so cold-water fish fade in a summer heatwave. The bite also follows solunar feeding — computed in-engine from the moon phase on the trip's real date (no API, no network) — strongest around the new and full moon. The header shows the trip's °C and a 🌑🌓🌕 feeding indicator.

Development

Zero runtime dependencies (pure Node + ANSI). The game core is split so it's testable without a TTY:

npm test        # node game/selftest.mjs — 110 assertions over the pure core
node game/launch.mjs --dry-run      # show the window-spawn plan for your env
node game/packcheck.mjs <pack.json> # validate a Spot Pack

game/core.mjs, world.mjs, render.mjs, pack.mjs, logbook.mjs are pure; game/index.mjs is the only file that touches the terminal.

Testing & contributing

Trying it out? See TESTING.md for what to look for and how to report. Want to add a Spot Pack, a species, or a fix? CONTRIBUTING.md has the dev setup and the one rule that matters (keep the core pure). PRs welcome — new real-world Spot Packs especially. MIT licensed.